A good DM will either scale up the difficulty of encounters to compensate for the min-maxers, or know the weaknesses of min-maxed PCs and hit them there (a min-maxed DPS PC often is very vulnerable to will saves, or to various forms of crowd control, or flying enemies, or something)
True, it’s going to be inherently very difficult to all have fun playing the same table when all the players are essentially playing different games. Some of the most fun D&D I have played with a group full of min-maxers and extremely difficult overtuned encounters. I’ve also had a lot of fun playing RP heavy, less combat focused campaigns. It’s difficult to mix, all the players kind of need to be on the same page/skill level
Sometimes it requires a hard "no" to stop that player from ruining the rest of the group's fun.
I can often get away with "softer" nos, such as gatekeeping min-max powergaming templates behind tests that most powergamers can't pass. The most effective of those is "if a commoner, a barkeep, or maybe a wandering bard were to describe your character's calling and profession, in setting, what would they say about you?"
That often works because people that make templates to fulfill a character or story concept can easily pass it. The powergamer usually just sees stackable perks and nothing else with a "Kirito Stark" style cringe name stamped on top of it, with no family or regional associations.
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A good DM will either scale up the difficulty of encounters to compensate for the min-maxers, or know the weaknesses of min-maxed PCs and hit them there (a min-maxed DPS PC often is very vulnerable to will saves, or to various forms of crowd control, or flying enemies, or something)
Frankly a good DM will take the min-maxer aside and ask them to tone it down because you want to have everybody operating at about the same level.
This is the way. :d20-fuck-ya:
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True, it’s going to be inherently very difficult to all have fun playing the same table when all the players are essentially playing different games. Some of the most fun D&D I have played with a group full of min-maxers and extremely difficult overtuned encounters. I’ve also had a lot of fun playing RP heavy, less combat focused campaigns. It’s difficult to mix, all the players kind of need to be on the same page/skill level
Sometimes it requires a hard "no" to stop that player from ruining the rest of the group's fun.
I can often get away with "softer" nos, such as gatekeeping min-max powergaming templates behind tests that most powergamers can't pass. The most effective of those is "if a commoner, a barkeep, or maybe a wandering bard were to describe your character's calling and profession, in setting, what would they say about you?"
That often works because people that make templates to fulfill a character or story concept can easily pass it. The powergamer usually just sees stackable perks and nothing else with a "Kirito Stark" style cringe name stamped on top of it, with no family or regional associations.